Comment by entropie
1 month ago
2025 I switched to nixos and will probably stay. I used gentoo for like 20 years. Its the distro of my heart.
With some notebooks, some of which were getting on in years, it was simply too resource-intensive to update. Only GHC, for example, often took 12+ hours to compile on some older notebooks.
I tried to list available packages on NixOS and nix-env consumed more than 6 GB Ram. Everyone told me not to use nix-env; everyone except NixOS manual. Trying to understand NixOS environment is a deep rabbit hole.
The Nix documentation is what drove me away from it years ago when I tried. I ended up landing on GNU Guix, where I have been for about 5 years now. I found the OS documentation to be much nicer (info pages!) and the decades of Scheme documentation makes the language easier to pick up too.
Seconded! I really liked Nix, but found the language and some of the tooling inscrutable. With (non)Guix I got all the Nix goodness, but in a form I understood much better. If Guix wasn't so good I'd be on Gentoo or Arch.
Yeah, it's in a weird state of officially being stuck to legacy channels/profiles and unofficially having moved to flakes. Excessive RAM usage with nix-env, which theoretically can be improved but requires deep design changes, was what driven me to flakes.
Would it not be sufficient to use the official binary packages?
They only added the binary packages at the end of 2023.